by Marko Kloos
Above them, the footsteps and voices reached the landing they had left just moments earlier. Solveig saw Stefan tensing behind her as he took aim at the stairs to his rear. A door flew open with a loud bang, and there was a brief swell of shouting before the sound of gunfire drowned out every other noise in the staircase. Cuthbert rushed ahead to the door at the end of this landing and kicked it open. The sounds of the gunfire drifted out into the space beyond and echoed off unseen walls and corners.
Stefan rushed her through the door after Cuthbert, who was standing with his gun at the ready and scanning the room for threats. The pod garage was a cavernous space that was filled with rows of patrol and emergency pods, neatly lined up in their recharging spots along the walls and down the middle of the hall. The vehicle lock in the back of the garage was fifty meters away, bright daylight and fresh air beckoning beyond.
“Hand me the rifle,” Cuthbert said and held out his free hand. Stefan looked back at Solveig and hesitated.
“Hand me the fucking rifle now,” Cuthbert repeated over the din of the gunfire reverberating in the staircase from the landing above. “I can put that to better use than you. Get her out of here. I’ll keep them bottled up.”
“Cuthbert, no,” Solveig protested. He looked back at her and shook his head.
“I’ll be right behind you, Miss Ragnar. Now get her the fuck out of here,” he addressed Stefan. Then he raised the rifle to his shoulder and took up position next to the door.
“Come on,” Stefan said and pulled her away. “We have to go, now.”
“Cuthbert,” she shouted, but her bodyguard was already focused on the task he had set for himself, to kill the people who were coming for his charge. She felt ashamed for every time she had thought of him as a nuisance, merely one of Marten’s snitches, an inexperienced understudy who was only by her side to keep an eye on her for Papa.
Stefan rushed her over to the nearest row of pods and crouched behind the cover they provided.
“Can you run?” he asked. She nodded, even though she wasn’t sure her legs would fully obey her right now if she tried. He pointed down the row of pods and toward the vehicle lock that led outside. On her sunny running track on the estate, she could cover that distance in ten seconds.
“When I tell you to run, you run that way, and you don’t stop,” Stefan said. “There’s an exit ramp that leads up. Once you’re halfway up the ramp, you’ll be out of sight and out of the line of fire. Do you understand?”
She nodded. Over by the doorway, Cuthbert squeezed off a burst of automatic fire into the darkness beyond, and she heard yells and shouted commands from the stairwell. Then there was a furious exchange of gunshots. Cuthbert moved to the side in a crouched stance, away from the doorway and the wall, firing off shots in rapid succession. Solveig watched him stumble as some of the return fire found its mark, but he gathered himself and kept up his barrage.
“Come on,” Stefan yelled and pulled her to her feet again. They dashed down the row of police pods toward the vehicle lock. When they were halfway there, a loud alarm Klaxon sounded, and a security barrier descended from the top of the lock. Stefan shouted in wordless frustration and tried to pull Solveig along faster, but Solveig could see that the barrier was coming down too fast for them to make it out in time. It settled on the ground with a dull thumping that had a sound of finality to it.
“Gods-damn it.” Stefan pulled her between two of the pods and pushed her down behind cover. By the door at the front of the garage, the gunfire had increased to a wild crescendo. Then it stopped, and the sudden silence was scarier to Solveig than the sounds of the gunshots had been. She peered out from behind the cover of the pod to see Cuthbert on the ground, the rifle loosely in his grasp. Someone in armor stepped next to him and kicked the rifle away. Then he aimed his own weapon at the prone Cuthbert and fired a short burst into his chest. She opened her mouth to let out the scream of horror and disbelief that was welling up in her like an explosion, but Stefan stifled it with his hand and pulled her back down. The suppressed wail she managed to produce was still enough to draw unwelcome attention. She heard a few terse commands and then footsteps heading their way.
“Two left,” Stefan said in an insistent whisper. “We can’t get out, so we have to go through them. Stay down.”
He peeked around his side of the pod, gun at the ready. As soon as he did, several shots rang out, and Solveig screamed as they tore into the pod and showered them with bits and pieces of broken laminate and glass. Stefan returned fire with his pistol, but his shots sounded woefully inadequate compared to the booming thunder of the rifles. There was another salvo of automatic fire. One of the rounds tore through the pod’s skin, so close to Solveig’s head that she could feel the hot sting of the projectile as it streaked past her cheek and smacked into the pod behind her. Stefan groaned and doubled over, then slumped on his side on the ground in front of her, dropping his weapon. The fire was relentless now, a steady rhythm of shots hammering away at their cover and tearing through the alloy hull of the police pod.
She picked up Stefan’s pistol, but as soon as she had her hand wrapped around the grip, a little sensor strip above the trigger guard turned red, and the trigger retracted into the body of the weapon, denying her the use of the gun. When the next salvo rang out, she felt a blow against her back that drove the breath from her lungs. She dropped the gun and fell over Stefan, covering his upper body with hers.
I’m going to die, she thought, and a strange sense of calm came over her. I’ll never see Aden again. But he knows that I love him. And at least I won’t die alone.
She tried to sit up but found that her back muscles were no longer obeying her. Solveig steadied her breath and concentrated on the feeling of Stefan’s body underneath hers, the smell of his hair, the memory of the way his cheeks had flushed a little when he had told her that he hadn’t stopped thinking about her since their first meal together.
The attackers were shouting now, but she couldn’t make out what they were yelling through the gunfire, and she didn’t want their words to be the last thing she heard, so she let the noise pass through her. Another fusillade of gunfire thundered in the confines of the garage, short bursts of rapid fire that had a different cadence. Then the gunfire stopped. For a moment, everything was quiet, and only the echo of the gunshots was ringing in her ears. She did not dare to look up, didn’t want to see the muzzle of the gun that would put an end to her existence, everything she was and would ever be, erased by someone who neither knew her nor cared about the thread he was pulling from the fabric of the universe forever.
“We’ve got wounded over here,” someone yelled right next to her.
The voice was that of a woman. Solveig jerked her head up and looked toward its source. A Gretian police officer was crouching at the end of the pod they had used for cover. She had a pistol in her hand, and a trickle of blood was running down her cheek and dripping onto the braid of silver hair that was hanging over her right shoulder. Behind her, Solveig saw soldiers in Alliance armor spreading out in the garage, weapons at the ready. Nearby, one of their attackers was sprawled out on the concrete floor of the garage a few dozen steps away, ragged holes in his armor that were still smoking from the impact of whatever had pierced the plating.
“Are you all right? Can you get up?”
Solveig shook her head and coughed, and the taste of blood filled her mouth. It felt like her lungs were no longer able to hold any air. She heard an alarm Klaxon, and when she looked at the source of the sound, she saw daylight pouring into the garage as the vehicle lock’s security barrier raised itself again, but it all sounded distant and muffled.
“You will be all right. The rescue crews are on the way. I need some extra hands over here,” the woman shouted over her shoulder at someone else.
Solveig looked at Stefan, who had his eyes closed. In the light that was coming in from the outside now, he looked very pale. She put her hand on his chest to see if he was still breathing, but
her fingertips felt numb, and she couldn’t sense any movement from him. She coughed again, and when she managed to force some air into her lungs again, she saw that her cough had sprayed blood all over the chest of Stefan’s tunic.
Several sets of strong arms grabbed her and carefully pulled her off Stefan. She tried to struggle, to remain with him, but there was no strength left in her body. Someone placed her on the ground and rolled her on her side. The wound in her back hadn’t hurt at first, but now it felt like someone was prodding her back with a red-hot steak knife. Then someone placed something cold and sticky on the spot where the pain was centered, and the agony subsided to tolerable levels of pain within moments. But whatever they had put on her back had no improving effect on her lungs, which still felt like she had to will the air into them with every breath. All around her, people were talking now, but she couldn’t make sense of anything they were saying, and their voices sounded thin and distorted.
If I close my eyes now, I’ll never open them again, she thought, but she found that the thought didn’t scare her anymore. Stefan was lying on his back just a few meters in front of her, his eyes closed, looking like he was merely peacefully asleep.
I’m sorry, she thought as she drifted into unconsciousness. I am so sorry.
CHAPTER 21
ADEN
“This is definitely a nosebleed ride,” Maya said from the flight station.
Aden could only muster a grunt in agreement. As far as he could see, none of them actually had nosebleeds yet, but the ship was running at over twenty g of acceleration, and the gravmag generator was hitting the limits of its compensating abilities. He didn’t know how many g they were feeling in their gravity couches by now, but he knew the number was a fair bit above one g because he could barely lift his head away from the headrest, and his chest felt like someone was pushing on it with both hands.
The ship they were pursuing was still well ahead of them, but Zephyr had a speed advantage, and the distance had shrunk to a mere one thousand kilometers since Maya had opened up the throttle all the way and set a pursuit course.
“A stern chase is a long chase,” Decker said. “I really hope our invisible friends are able to keep up, or we’re going to have our asses hanging out in the breeze when we get to wherever these people are going.”
“I can’t see shit through our drive plume,” Tess replied. “But we still have a data link going. From the ping, they’re about ninety thousand kilometers behind now.”
“This may not be the smartest thing we’ve ever done,” Maya said.
“We left ‘smart’ well behind the moment I sent the Rhodians our message,” Decker said. “Now we have to see this through.”
On the navigation plot screen, the icon for the unknown ship forged ahead, still at seventeen g, its drive plume a bright signal flare that was pouring out infrared and electromagnetic radiation like a high-powered transmitter. The other ship had counted on its speed to increase its distance from the Rhodians quickly, then return to ballistic flight and become invisible again once they had opened the gap sufficiently. But with Zephyr giving chase and more than matching their speed, they would have to keep running until one of them ran out of reactor fuel. In the meantime, Zephyr was gaining on them every second, broadcasting their position back to the Rhodian warship and anyone else who was in the sector.
“I don’t want to get too close,” Decker said. “I want some reaction time. Just in case they have more missiles and decide to fire one down their wake at us.”
“We’ll overtake them in four and a half minutes if we keep burning the way we’re going.”
“Back us off to match their acceleration, keep the gap constant for now. Aden, if we still have that comms link, ask our Rhody friends what they know about the weaponry on that bird.”
Aden checked the link and sent a connect request, which was accepted promptly.
“Hecate, we are backing off the burn a bit so we won’t overshoot them. Do you have any intel at all on the armament that bandit is carrying?”
“If that’s the same one we’ve run into three times now, they’ve launched two missiles every time and then run away,” the reply came from the Rhodian commander. “If I had to bet, I’d say someone fitted that ship with two missile tubes and no easy reloads. But there’s no way to know if they don’t have a gun mount tucked away somewhere.”
“I doubt it,” Decker commented. “Slugs are cheap. If they had a cannon, they would have sent some rounds our way already, just to make us dodge.”
“We will keep our distance, Hecate. They’re not going to disappear again.”
“You are doing just fine. Keep relaying your telemetry and your sensor data. We are going to keep up as best as we can.”
“Copy that, Hecate. We’ll keep the link active.” Aden ended the connection.
“Burning at seventeen g.” Maya’s voice didn’t sound strained in the least. The weight on Aden’s chest seemed to lift just a little bit. Tristan would have hated this. He didn’t care for high-g runs, he remembered.
“We got some reactor juice to spare now,” Tess said. “We could make ourselves even more of a nuisance and turn on all the active gear. Maybe we can get a preview of where they are heading.”
“Wherever that is, it’ll be out in the middle of nowhere,” Maya said from above. “We are a long way from anything. The closest transfer lane is over a million klicks off.”
“Do it,” Decker told Tess. “Go active on the bow sensors. Make their threat detectors go off. Maybe they’ll do something stupid. They don’t know for sure we’re not armed.”
“I wonder if they know we have company trailing behind us,” Aden said.
“Not likely. We can’t see them through our own drive plume. In fact, I doubt we could detect them even if we weren’t throwing out that heat flare. That is one stealthy ship,” Tess replied.
Aden watched her as she brought up another screen and activated the bow array with a quick and practiced series of taps on the input fields.
“Bow sensors are hot. Commencing active sweep. Distance to bandit is nine hundred fifty-one kilometers, decreasing at fifty meters per second.”
“We have the drive blowing at seventeen g and the sensors transmitting at full power,” Decker said. “Any hobbyist with store-bought astronomy gear can probably pick us up all the way from Hades right now.”
Tess chuckled.
“I can pipe in some Acheroni dance tunes from the Mnemosyne over shortwave comms if you want. Maybe go all in and turn our docking lights on, too. Make it a party.”
“Henry’s going to be angry when he finds out what he missed,” Decker replied.
I was wrong, Aden thought. Tristan would have loved this reckless rogue business, high-g or not. The idea brought a smile to his face.
On the navigation plot, the icon representing the fleeing ship seemed to hang in space nine hundred kilometers in front of them, their speeds matched to tens of meters per second. It seemed pointless to Aden for the other ship to be burning its fuel like this, knowing that their pursuers could match them gravity for gravity, but people did irrational things when they knew they were being chased.
They were another half hour into the chase when Tess muttered a curse from her gravity couch, where she was looking at data on multiple screens.
“What’s on your mind, Tess?” Decker asked.
“I took the time to do some millimeter-wave and laser mapping,” Tess replied. “It’s kind of tricky through the noise from their exhaust plume, but our aspect angle has been stable for a while now. Look at the radar mapping of our bandit’s hull,” Tess replied. “And then check out their drive signature.”
She flicked copies of her screens to the central navigation screen, where they arranged themselves around the main display.
“Does that look familiar to you?”
Decker looked at the images silently for a few moments and let out a low whistle.
“I’ll be gods-damned.”
“What is it?” Aden asked. “What are we looking at here?”
“That,” Tess said, “is what we look like when you map our hull with radar and a laser. And that’s more or less what our drive signature looks like. That thing is a Tanaka model two thirty-nine.”
“One of the other few two thirty-nines they made,” Decker said. “I’ve never seen one of them out and about on the trade routes. I’ve always wondered who ended up buying those.”
“Why aren’t they as fast as we are?” Aden asked.
“When the consortium—when Tristan had this ship fitted, he went for low mass. The only thing we have that adds extra weight is the PDS. But that only added a few hundred kilos,” Tess explained. “Everything else is as light as possible. Right down to the furniture in the galley. If they are doing three g less at full burn, they added a bunch of hardware to their stock configuration.”
“Two missile tubes, for example,” Maya contributed. “That shit is heavy. And whatever stealth layers they added to the hull. They probably have two hundred tons on us at least. Unless they’re holding back.”
Decker shook her head. “I don’t think they are. I think that if they had the speed, they’d use it right now.”
She looked over at Tess.
“The Rhodies are going to be interested in that data. They’ve been looking for this thing for months.”
“I’ll send it to them,” Tess said.
On the navigational display, an alarm chirped. On the outer edge of the sensor cone, a new icon appeared on the screen, then three more in quick succession.
“Now it gets interesting.” Tess checked her screens. “We got some hard returns here. Four confirmed contacts, distance ninety-eight thousand and dropping at a hundred klicks per second.”
“Shit. Now we know where they were running, I guess. Let the Rhodies know we are heading for company. We’re making a huge blind spot for them with that drive plume,” Decker said.
